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Hospitals, clinics in Port-au-Prince devastated

Most hospitals and clinics in and around Port-au-Prince have collapsed or closed, according to the group Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers. Its health teams are now setting up tents to attend to the massive numbers of people injured in Tuesday’s 7.0 earthquake.
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres and other health-related charities already on the ground, including Partners in Health, are reporting a desperate need for bandages, pain medication, antibiotics and other health supplies.

Offers for help are coming in from many quarters, but working out logistics is a considerable problem.
Dr. Serge Thys is chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia Hospital in West Palm Beach and on the board of a charity dedicated to helping people in Haiti, called Gaskov Clerge.
For the past 10 years the charity has sent a medical mission to the town on the Southern coast of Haiti where he grew up, Les Cayes, and Thys said the group wants to send a mission to Port-au-Prince as soon as possible.
Thys said that Columbia Hospital’s parent company, HCA, has told him it will donate its southern U.S. hospitals’ hurricane supplies to the quake victims, and he has medical professionals offering to volunteer as well. The problem he’s trying to work out now is how to deliver those supplies and volunteers.
“Whenever we can get into the country we will get a medical team on board,” he said. “The problem is to get them there.”

The Palm Beach County Medical Society’s Medical Reserve Corps is getting organized as well, said Tenna Wiles, CEO of the Medical Society. They are compiling a list of available supplies and awaiting word from the Florida Department of Health on possible mobilization, she said.